The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

More and more film fun with something other than a Leica M

Godfrey

Well-known member
Never heard of it - I had to Google it! An interesting device, albeit not exactly suited for some uses such as 'street'. Presumably the resolution etc should be better than from the Fuji Instax?
Even that first test image is pretty sharp! :)

Of course there's a limit to the film's resolution, and the image is small (about 50% of the area of a Polaroid SX-70 frame). But they're cute and look nice when I get the exposure right. That's what I'm working on now: guidelines for exposure. The film is ISO 800, I've set the ISO on my meter to 100 as a starting point per the instructions. So far, it's looking like ISO 50 is probably close to the mark. The relay lens is f/4 so lens openings larger than that will affect DoF but not transmitted illumination. My first pack of film in it is dedicated to figuring out a good approximation for how to set exposure, then I'll start seeing what I can get from it.

Street? Likely not. It will be fun for some kinds of photography, but it's never going to rival an SX-70 for all around versatility and usability. I can do street with an SX-70 ... I wouldn't dream of it with this. It's just a little too clumsy in use.

Makes me dream of an Instax Square back for my Hasselblad 500CM or SWC, however. I wonder what it would take to create that... :D

G
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
Went out for a walk to test the Instant Magny 35 in action. My neighbor's two boys were riding scooters in the parking lot across the street...




Leica M4-2, M-Rokkor 90mm f/4
ISO 100 @ f/5.6 @ 1/15 on Fujifilm Instax Square
Scanned with iPhone 8 Plus, processed in SnapSeed

enjoy!
G
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
Yes, I have the Polaroid back for the Hassy too. It's of limited use now, in the age of digital, and the film is no longer in production so I keep it mostly as an artifact of days gone. :(

But this gizmo with Instax Square film gives me pause to think: How cool would it be to adapt one of the processing/film holder units to a Hasselblad back? The Instax Square format is a 62x62 image area, almost the same as Hasselblad's 56x56. I'm sure it could be done with some ingenuity... :D

I saw a project of this sort recently ... Gotta look it up and see what they did.

G
 

MartinN

Well-known member
I think it's only a question of time when we are going to see commercially produced instant
backs for current instant film types and 'vintage' cameras. Your Magny 35 is certainly one
of the earliest implementations. Backs for medium format cameras with exchangeable backs
should be a lot easier to manufacture without any magnifying optics. I don't exactly need
it today so I can wait and see what evolves. If not then some business could start producing
FP-100 series compatible instant packs. This world is really changing fast and there are so
many cameras out here that need film.

On a cost perspective it's not so different with instant becaus every time I click a Velvia frame
it costs me about 2€ with processing and film.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
I think it's only a question of time when we are going to see commercially produced instant
backs for current instant film types and 'vintage' cameras. Your Magny 35 is certainly one
of the earliest implementations. Backs for medium format cameras with exchangeable backs
should be a lot easier to manufacture without any magnifying optics. I don't exactly need
it today so I can wait and see what evolves. If not then some business could start producing
FP-100 series compatible instant packs. This world is really changing fast and there are so
many cameras out here that need film.

On a cost perspective it's not so different with instant becaus every time I click a Velvia frame
it costs me about 2€ with processing and film.
I hunted around a little bit on Kickstarter. Two Hasselblad-Instax back projects were started but neither hit their funding goals. However, these guys have hacked an Instax Mini to be a back for a Hasselblad 500: https://mymodernmet.com/hasselblad-instax-hybrid/
It's not a production piece, but I've sent email to see what they ran into in doing it beyond what's in the article. An SQ6 camera is about $100 and could be the basis for a project like that.

But getting another Instant Magny 35 might be a better way to go. They're about $180, but the dark slide and other bits, as well as the motorized processing unit, are all there already. The tricky part would be to get the film plane in the right spot after adapting a Hassy back mount. Hmm hmm hmm. Seems eminently doable, though. Some madness may transpire. :D

G
 

Godfrey

Well-known member

The Artist On Exhibit
Polaroid SLR 670x by MiNT + Polaroid TeleAdapter 1.5x
Polaroid Originals 600 Color film

My friend Larry Colen participated at a "Meet the Artist" event this past Sunday, up into the foothills of the South Bay at Redwood Love in Saratoga. I made an afternoon cycle expedition of it ... a 21 mile ride with a 500 foot elevation gain! ... and took the chance to capture this portrait of Larry in the gallery.

I didn't want to use flash so it's not quite as sharp as it might be, and the light has an overly warm tone, but I like it more than flash would have looked since I didn't bring the flash extension cable with me to get the flash into a more suitable position. About a half-second exposure... I did a quick capture with the iPhone and use SnapSeed to do the 'not particularly perfect' correction for display. :)

Enjoy!
G
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
In the class of "Thoroughly Impractical But Still Amusing Things To Do With An Instant Magny 35/Leica M", I set up this entertaining beast:


It's an old Sigma 600mm f/8 cat in Nikon mount that I bought some years back for less than $100. Mostly useless, but too cheap to waste time selling, I thought I'd play with doing extreme telephoto with the Instant Magny 35.

I set it up on the tripod and fitted the Leica CL to it to zero in the focus and find the correct exposure, then carefully removed the CL from it and fitted the M4-2 and Instant Magny 35. I made an exposure at 1/125 second (lens opening is of course a fixed f/8):


Notice that the Sigma 600 vignettes when mounted on the Leica M lens mount. This is because of the relatively small diameter of the mount flange ... It doesn't vignette on a Nikon F.

To show the scale of the magnification this achieves, I made the same photo with the M4-2 and Pentax-L 43mm f/1.9 Limited, same exposure settings:


Mostly silly and time consuming, but heck: It keeps me off the streets. :D

enjoy!
G

Addendum:
Oh yeah, I did snap an exposure of the steeple with the Leica CL + Sigma 600mm too, to be sure I had the exposure and focus correct. Captured raw and processed in SnapSeed on the iPad Pro 11. I thought you might like to see it:


I didn't L->R flip the Instax SQ prints, that's why they're reversed from this image. :D

G
 
Last edited:
Top